Looking for alternatives after losing a decade of labor, he noticed the advertisement for contributors to the new project of Diderot and d’Alembert, sent in a few sample articles to Le Breton, the publisher, and the collaboration, announced in the third volume (1753), was begun. Although he began with topics close to his specialties in botany and natural history, he gradually expanded his range, using his Dutch gazetteer experience to turn out competent if not sparkling entries on every kind of topic.
A respected scholar with elections to the royal academies of Bordeaux, Sweden, and Berlin, and to London’s Royal Society, Jaucourt was viewed
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by some as a mere compiler. Others, such as Voltaire, admired his work, and it is doubtful that the Encyclopédie had a more stalwart friend or defender. Jaucourt sold his house (to the publisher) to pay for his small staff of secretaries. In a letter to Sophie Volland, Diderot wrote of Jaucourt that “this man has for six or seven years been in the middle of four or five secretaries—reading, dictating, working thirteen to fourteen hours a day, and that situation has not yet bored him.”5 When Diderot announced to him the impending conclusion of the work, Jaucourt is reported to have responded with a long face of dismay. It is at least clear that he wrote nothing after the completion of the project in 1765 until his death, in 1780, after having turned out nearly a quarter of all the articles—most of them signed, and totaling nearly five million words—in Diderot’s dictionary.
ABBÉ EDME-FRANÇOIS MALLET, 1713–55 (1,925 articles). Born in Melun to a family of pewterers, Mallet received early instruction from a local priest before being sent to a Barnabite secondary school in Montargis. He then pursued his studies in Paris, completing his doctorate in theology in 1742. There followed stints as a tutor (1742–44) and as a parish priest in a small church near Melun. During this period, he wrote two works, Principes pour la lecture des poëtes [Principles for reading the poets] (1745) and Essai sur l’étude des belles-lettres [Essay on the study of literature] (1747), which promote classical French aesthetic theory and express skepticism about Locke’s sensationalist philosophy of knowledge as well as about the influence of English letters more generally.
In 1751 he was appointed to a chair of theology at the University of Paris, where he wrote two works on oratory, a work on Dutch diplomacy under Louis XIV and a translation of an Italian work on the French religious wars—in which he defended the assassination of the Duke of Guise but condemned the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.
The nearly two thousand articles that he wrote for the Encyclopédie in the few years of collaboration allotted to him before his untimely death included large numbers on commerce (five hundred or so, mostly compilations
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from earlier reference works) and even more on theology and religion, where his erudition was more fruitful. His views are difficult to summarize. He affirmed the existence of Hell, sided with the Jesuits against the Jansenists over the bull Unigenitus (in an article suppressed by Malesherbes, the book trade director), and defended the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV (in an unpublished draft of the article PACIFICATION). On the other hand, he denied rational proof of eternal punishment, opposed the Sorbonne’s condemnation of the controversial thesis by abbé de Prades (which precipitated the first government censorship of the Encyclopédie), and won the trust of d’Alembert, whose eulogy in volume 6 depicts him as a fine scholar, a mild and modest man, and an “enemy of persecution.”
FRANÇOIS QUESNAY, 1694–1774 (3 articles). The founder of the Physiocratic school of economists, Quesnay was born into a farming family in Normandy. Marrying a grocer’s daughter in 1717, he practiced as a master surgeon in Mantes from 1718 to 1734, where he became a civic leader. The Duke of Villeroy and the first surgeon to the king, La Peyronie, learned about him and brought him to Paris, making him Villeroy’s personal surgeon and heaping honors and offices on him. He became an active participant in the surgeons’ continuing attempt to enhance their status relative to the physicians. One of his patients, the Countess d’Estrades, recommended him to Madame de Pompadour, who made him a resident royal physician in 1749. From there, he became a trusted confidant at court as well as a helpful agent for Diderot, Voltaire, Marmontel, and other men of letters in their dealings with the government.
His chief importance lay in his development of the school of theory that came to be known as Physiocracy. From 1758 until about 1770, he was the acknowledged master of this school, combining the most robust free-market theorizing of the period with a resolutely non-Montesquieuan political model the school called “legal despotism.” The Physiocrats were supported by the vigorous and concerted writing and journalistic efforts of such talented figures as Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de La Rivière, abbé Nicolas Baudeau, and the Marquis de Mirabeau. Diderot himself generally supported the school through the 1760s,
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when the leading agenda item was complete freedom for the grain trade, a proposal partially adopted by the French government in 1763 and 1764. By the time of abbé Galiani’s stinging parody of the rigid dogmatism and universalism of the school in his Dialogues on the grain trade (1770), with its appeal for a more Montesquieuan flexibility in treating the different liberty-interests of different regimes, Diderot, like many others, had had second thoughts about the Physiocrats.
For the Encyclopédie, Quesnay wrote an important anonymous article, EVIDENCE, as well as two lengthy entries on economic topics, CEREALS and FERMIERS (Farmers), which were early precursors of his Physiocratic doctrine, appearing as they did a few years before the formation of the school. By the time of the government crackdown in 1759, Quesnay, who had always been cautious about his association with the Encyclopedists because of his court position, was asking d’Alembert to withdraw his manuscripts for HOMMES (Men), IMPÔTS (Taxes), and INTÉRÉT DE L’ARGENT (Interest Rates), and his collaboration ceased. But many of the articles that appeared on economic topics in the Encyclopédie bore the imprint of his influence, including Damilaville’s FIVE PERCENT TAX.
JEAN-FRANÇOIS, MARQUIS DE SAINT-LAMBERT, 1716–1803 (17 articles). The future poet was born in Nancy into a poor and obscure noble family. After a Jesuit education, he served in the infantry and for the king of Poland. Stationed at Lunéville, he became acquainted with Voltaire, fell in love with the latter’s mistress Emilie du Châtelet, and fathered a child with her. When she died in childbirth (1749), he gained notoriety and moved to Paris, where his poetry began to attract attention. Voltaire described his now-obscure Les Saisons, an idyll to rural life that urged noblemen to return to their country estates and revitalize the countryside, as “the only work in our age that will make it into posterity.” In the Seven Years’ War, he became a colonel in the French army, though an attack of paralysis led him to leave the military for good in 1758 and instead pursue a life of letters.
He was friendly with the Encyclopédie circle, including Diderot, Mme. Geoffrin, d’Holbach, Grimm, Mme. d’Epinay, and, especially, Mme. d’Houdetot, with whom he had an affair celebrated for its dignity and fidelity until his death nearly half a century later. His association with the
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Encyclopédie project began in 1756 with volume 6, and he wrote at least sixteen articles, all anonymous, most on political and philosophical subjects. His essay LUXURY, which was published as a separate tract immediately after its appearance in Diderot’s dictionary (1765), became one of the most influential statements on that popular theme before the Revolution.6
His plays and especially his highly scientific and philosophic poetry led to his selection by the Académie Française in 1770, where he became a force. His Catéchisme universel, a lengthy work on the origins and nature of human morality, won the grand prize for morale at the Institut de France in 1810. Saint-Lambert died in 1803.
ANNE-ROBERT-JACQUES TURGOT, Baron of Aulne, 1727–81 (5 articles).